This is said to signify, that those who do not conform to the will of their priests or teachers by associating with them, or quitting their country in company with them, when persecuted, are infidels.

Articles relative to Works.

ART. 1. Abandonment of the world-Houses, land, women, children, gold, silver, &c.

ART. 2. Flight, or the abandonment of one's country.

When the Mehdivis are persecuted on the score of their religion, they may either have recourse to arms, or abandon their country. One is absolutely necessary.

ART. 3. The conversation or society of the virtuous.

ART. 4. To quit all but God—that is, seclusion from the world.

ART. 5. Constant remembrance or meditation on God.

The perfect fulfilment of this command includes every moment of a man's life.

There are however certain times of prayer esteemed most excellent; one called Sultan el-leil, the King of the night, from Aazr to Aashi, or from four in the evening to about eight at night; the other Sultan el-nehar, the King of the day, from day-light to sun-rise.

ART. 6. Endeavour (by prayer &c.) to obtain the sight of God, until it be accomplished either by the eyes of the head, those of the heart, or in a vision, &c.—Regarding this, see ART. 14 of Faith.

ART. 7. To fight for the word of God either with the sword of war, or the sword of poverty or of prayer.

This command was not given to the Mehdi, but to his successor Syud Khondmir. The original is to be found in the Koran-" They killed and were killed in the way of God."

They are of opinion that the killing an infidel is no sin, and that they may lawfully retaliate and revenge themselves on any by whom they or their sect may be molested.

This appears to extend very far.

A division of this sect named Kundelwals, and certain Mehdivi Pathans

called Punnees, are considered by the Mehdivis themselves mere assassins. They are accused of holding it lawful to murder, on slight pretexts, any differing from them; and assigning a high rank in heaven to the murderers.

ART. 8. Repentance before the last moment of existence.

ART. 9. To possess the qualities or perform the duties which are pre

sumed to constitute a Momin, namely,

1. To turn the heart to God entirely.

2. Continual meditation.

3. Seclusion from the world.

4. Oblivion or extinction of self.

ART. 10. To be endowed with those qualities and perform those duties which are the sources of religion, and by which a believer is deemed a Momin, namely,

1. The fear of God.

2. Increase of faith at hearing the Koran read.

3. Perfect resignation to the will of God.

4. The observance of the five stated times of prayer.

5. The bestowal of alms consistent with one's ability.

There are other duties of religion, but they will all on reflection be found comprehended in the above.

XV.

BOOKS

ON THE SACRED BOOKS AND RELIGION OF THE PARSIS.

In a Letter from WILLIAM ERSKINE, Esq. to Brigadier-General Sir JOHN MALCOLM, K.C.B. and K.L.S.

MY DEAR SIR,

Read 27th April, 1819.

THE desire which you express to ascertain any circumstances that may fix the real age of the Zend-Avesta of the Parsis, and of the Desûtîr now in the possession of Mulla Firuz, has induced me to make some inquiries connected with those subjects, and I shall make no apology for troubling you with the result at considerable length. In the present letter I shall make a few remarks on the religious doctrines of the Parsis, and on the antiquity of their present opinions. The wide range which you took in your History of Persia prevented you from entering into any minute examination of the present state and tenets of that ancient but obscure sect; a subject which is indeed better fitted for a separate dissertation. In a subsequent letter I shall examine the authenticity of the Desâtir, and attempt to ascertain what degree of credit is due to the accounts of the ancient sects of Persians detailed in the Dabistan.

The observations on the first of these subjects shall be divided into four parts: in the first I shall take a rapid view of what is known of the ancient languages of Persia: in the second I shall examine the comparative value and authenticity of the details of ancient Persian history, as contained in the writers of Greece and Rome on one hand, and of Persia on the other: in the third I shall give a short sketch of the tenets of the modern Parsis, and of the works ascribed to Zoroaster or Zertusht, on which they are founded: and in the fourth I shall endeavour briefly to indicate the proofs of the antiquity of many of their particular doctrines and observances. The subject is in itself obscure, and, like most of those in

which religion is concerned, has been rendered still more so by fiction and forgery.

I. Of the Ancient Languages of Persia.

The knowledge which we possess of the ancient languages of Persia is very limited. No Persian writer that has reached our times, at least none of acknowledged authenticity, lived much more than eight hundred years ago; and even such as we possess are unfortunately more anxious to detail the military transactions of the periods of which they treat, than to afford any correct notions regarding the manners or languages of the different tribes or provinces of their country. The best account of the older languages of Persia is that of the learned author of the Ferhengi Jehangiri*, which you have adopted. He mentions seven: the Farsi, Deri, Pehlevi, Hervi, Segzi, Zaweli†, and Soghdi ‡. These are evidently not different languages, but dialects of the same tongue as spoken in different provinces. The Farsi is the dialect of Fars, or Persia Proper; the Hervi that of Heri or Herat, that is of Khorasan; the Segzi is that of Segistan; the Zaweli is that of Zabulistan, formerly a very extensive province, which comprehended in its limits Kandahar and even Ghazni; and the Soghdi that of Soghd, a province that included the rich cities of Samarkand and Bokhara, and probably the greater part of the cultivated country between the Oxus and Jaxartes, where from the remotest times a dialect of the Persian seems to have been spoken. All of these four dialects, it will be remarked, except the first, were spoken to the east of the Great Persian Desert. What language the Deri was has been disputed. Some would make it the dialect of the valleys that stretch among the Persian mountains, and of the remote glens or deras, from which word they derive its name. But it is generally alluded to as a highly refined dialect, and as the most polished of the whole; so that it was probably

* Jemal-u-din Husain ibn Fakhr-u-din Hasan Anjû.

+ Anquetil calls this the Draveli.

In the History of Persia, vol. i. p. 202, called the Suodi, probably from the Persian manuscript consulted, reading

سندی for

سعدي

rather the language of the Der-i-Shah, of the Royal Gate or Court, in short the Derbâri or Court language, in all countries held to be the most elegant. That it was not regarded as the language of rustics, is sufficiently plain from the traditionary saying recorded of Muhammed, that if the Almighty wished to address the angels in the language of command, he used the Arabic; but if in the tone of mildness and beneficence, the Deri *. .

The Farsi and Pehlevi appear to have been collateral languages, spoken like all the other five at the same time in Persia, but to the west of the Great Desert. But they probably differed more from each other than the other five did from the Farsi. As the Farsi was the language of the province of Fars, the Pehlevi seems to have been that of the Pehlu, the Arabian or Chaldean border, and appears to have prevailed in Khuzistân, at Kermanshah, and probably at Hamadân, and over all Persian Irâk. The Arabian Irak, as well as Mesopotamia and the Chaldean provinces along the Tigris, and to the east of that river, was subject to the Persian monarchs for a long series of ages, from the destruction of the Assyrian empire by Cyrus till the destruction of the Persian empire by the Mussulmans. As many kings of Persia, especially under the Parthian and Sasanian dynasties, had fixed their capital in countries where the spoken language was of Arabian or Simmetic origin, the intercourse between the limitary Persian and Arabian countries, subject to the same princes, and governed by the same laws, must have been very considerable. The road from Persia to Ctesiphon, or Al-Modain, lay through an Arabian district; the Persian troops served year after year on the Grecian or Roman frontier, in the same ranks with troops levied in the Arabian provinces of the empire, and in districts where the language was wholly of Arabian, Syrian, or Chaldean growth; so that necessity must have compelled them to acquire at least a slight knowledge of some of these kindred tongues, to be able to communicate with the inhabitants of the country in which they served, and to understand their companions in arms: all merchants,

VOL. II.

* Hyde, Rel. Vet. Pers. p. 429, Ed. Oxon. 1760.

2Q